Howto start jEdit

At work I am (in)famous for being responsible for getting jEdit onto everybodies desktop. Despite this everyone uses textpad :-/. These primitive souls are perfectly happy (or ignorant?) not using syntax highlighting, not having their xml validated, not being able to search and replace using regexs, not being able to indent their xml files, not having autocompletion, etc.

Anyway, one of the nastier aspects of jEdit is integrating properly with windows and configuring it. Older versions included a convenient but broken .exe frontend. Newer versions require some manual setup to get going.

First of all, the jvm matters. jEdit runs faster and prettier with jre 1.5. Second of all, select native look and feel unless you really like the shitty java look and feel.

A crucial thing is to provide enough memory AND specify a small enough minimum heapsize. Contrary to the popular belief, java programs are quite efficient. jEdit for example can run with just 10MB of memory heap. Unless of course you open up big files or multiple files in which case you may need more than that. The trick with Java is that you can specify upper and lower limits on the memory heap. The garbage collector will never shrink the heap below the minimum or grow it above the maximum. With jEdit, most of the time you don’t need that much, so specify 10Mb as the minimum. You may need more sometimes though, especially when you are running lots of plugins so specify 256 as the upper limit (probably way more than jEdit will ever use).

Another crucial setting is -reuseview which will allow you to reuse already running jedit windows for opening new files.

Edited as suggested in the comments, wordpress conveniently removes slashes when you save the text :-(.

Update 02-04-2011:

It’s been a while since I wrote this and when I hit my own post accidentally with a Google query, I knew it was time to do a little update. All of the above is still valid as far as I know, except I now use a mac. For a mac, or in fact any linux/unix type installation, there’s a convenient way to start jEdit from a bash function. Just include the line below in your .profile or .bashrc (adjust paths as needed of course):

Like this:

9 Replies to “Howto start jEdit”

I think many of you would figure this yourself, yet I think I should put my 2 pennies here. The reg file entries shown has some missing ‘\’ characters. The words delimited by these ‘\’ are ‘HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT’, ‘*’, ‘shell’, ‘Open with jEdit’, ‘command’, ‘double_quotes_except_for_the_first_and_the_last_one_in_the_last_line’ and ofcourse ‘\’.

Thanks for pointing that out. I pasted the correct text but then wordpress did a \’creative\’ edit on my text and removed some slashes. Apparently a single slash is fine and a double slash becomes a single slash?.

I fixed it by typing for of them and saving only once (second save would get me back where I started). I must definately look into some alternative way to input text in wordpress.